ALL NATIONS, IN ALL ERAS OF HISTORY, are swept from time to time by
waves of contagious excitement over fads or fashions or dramatic public
issues. But the size and frequency of these waves is highly variable, as is
the nature of the events which set them in motion. One of the striking
characteristics of the era of Coolidge Prosperity was the unparalleled
rapidity and unanimity with which millions of men and women turned their
attention, their talk, and their emotional interest upon a series of
tremendous trifles-a heavyweight boxing-match, a murder trial, a new
automobile model, a transatlantic flight.

Most of the causes celebres which thus stirred the country from end to end
were quite unimportant from the traditional point of view of the historian.
The future destinies of few people were affected in the slightest by the
testimony of the "pig woman" at the Hall-Mills trial or the attempt to
rescue Floyd Collins from his Kentucky cave. Yet the fact that such things
could engage the hopes and fears of unprecedented numbers of people was
anything but unimportant. No account of the Coolidge years would be
adequate which did not review that strange procession of events which a
nation tired of "important issues" swarmed to watch, or which did not take
account of that remarkable chain of circumstances which produced as the
hero of the age, not a great public servant, not a reformer, not a warrior,
but a stunt flyer who crossed the ocean to win a money prize.

By the time Calvin Coolidge reached the White House, the tension of the
earlier years of the Post-war Decade had been largely relaxed. Though
Woodrow Wilson still clung feebly to life in the sunny house in S Street,
the League issue was dead and only handfuls of irreconcilable idealists
imagined it to have a chance of resuscitation. The radicals were
discouraged, the labor movement had lost energy and prestige since the
days of the Big Red Scare, and under the beneficent influence of easy
riches-or at least of easy Fords and Chevrolets-individualistic capitalism
had settled itself securely in the saddle. The Ku Klux Klan numbered its
millions, yet already it was beginning to lose that naive ardor which had
lighted its fires on a thousand hilltops; it was becoming less of a
crusade and more of a political racket. Genuine public issues, about
which the masses of the population could be induced to feel intensely,
were few and far between. There was prohibition, to be sure; anybody
could get excited about prohibition; but because the division of opinion
on liquor cut across party lines, every national politician, almost without
exception, did his best to thrust this issue into the background. In the
agricultural Northwest and Middle West there was a violent outcry for
farm relief, but it could command only a scattered and half-hearted
interest throughout the rest of a nation which was becoming progressively
urbanized. Public spirit was at low ebb; over the World Court, the oil
scandals, the Nicaraguan situation, the American people as a whole
refused to bother themselves. They gave their energies to triumphant
business, and for the rest they were in holiday mood. "Happy," they
might have said, "is the nation which has no history-and a lot of good
shows to watch." They were ready for any good show that came along.

It was now possible in the United States for more people to enjoy
the same good show at the same time than in any other land on earth
or at any previous time in history. Mass production was not confined
to automobiles; there was mass production in news and ideas as well.
For the system of easy nation-wide communication which had long since
made the literate and prosperous American people a nation of faddists
was rapidly becoming more widely extended, more centralized, and
more effective than ever before.

To begin with, there were fewer newspapers, with larger circulations,
and they were standardized to an unprecedented degree by the increasing
use of press-association material and syndicated features. Between 1914
and 1926, as Silas Bent has pointed out, the number of daily papers in
the country dropped from 2,580 to 2,001, the number of Sunday papers
dropped from 571 to 541, and the aggregate circulation per issue rose
from somewhat over 28,000,000 to 36,000,000. The city of Cleveland,
which a quarter of a century before had had three morning papers, now
had but one; Detroit, Minneapolis, and St. Louis had lost all but one
apiece; Chicago, during a period in which it had doubled in population,
had seen the number of its morning dailies drop from seven to two.
Newspapers all over the country were being gathered into chains under
more or less centralized direction: by 1927 the success of the Hearst
and Scripps-Howard systems and the hope of cutting down overhead
costs had led to the formation of no less than 55 chains controlling 230
daily papers with a combined circulation of over 13,000,000.

No longer did the local editor rely as before upon local writers and
cartoonists to fill out his pages and give them a local flavor; the central
office of the chain, or newspaper syndicates in New York, could provide
him with editorials, health talks, comic strips, sob-sister columns, house-
hold hints, sports gossip, and Sunday features prepared for a national audience and guaranteed to tickle the mass mind. Andy Gump and Dorothy
Dix had their millions of admirers from Maine to Oregon, and the words
hammered out by a reporter at Jack Dempsey's training-camp were
devoured with one accord by real-estate men in Florida and riveters in
Seattle.

Meanwhile, the number of national magazines with huge circulations
had increased, the volume of national advertising had increased, a horde
of publicity agents had learned the knack of associating their cause or
product with whatever happened to be in the public mind at the moment,
and finally there was the new and vastly important phenomenon of radio
broadcasting, which on occasion could link together a multitude of
firesides to hear the story of a World Series game or a Lindbergh welcome. The national mind had become as never before an instrument
upon which a few men could play. And these men were learning, as
Mr. Bent has also shown, to play upon it in a new way-to concentrate
upon one tune at a time.

Not that they put their heads together and deliberately decided to do
this. Circumstances and self-interest made it the almost inevitable thing
for them to do. They discovered-the successful tabloids were daily teaching them-that the public tended to become excited about one thing at a
time. Newspaper owners and editors found that whenever a Dayton trial
or a Vestris disaster took place, they sold more papers if they gave it all
they had-their star reporters, their front-page display, and the bulk of
their space. They took full advantage of this discovery: according to Mr.
Bent's compilations, the insignificant Gray-Snyder murder trial got a bigger "play" in the press than the sinking of the Titanic; Lindbergh's flight,
than the Armistice and the overthrow of the German Empire. Syndicate
managers and writers, advertisers, press agents, radio broadcasters, all
were aware that mention of the leading event of the day, whatever it might
be, was the key to public interest. The result was that when something
happened which promised to appeal to the popular mind, one had it hurled
at one in huge headlines, waded through page after page of syndicated
discussion of it, heard about it on the radio, was reminded of it again and
again in the outpourings of publicity-seeking orators and preachers, saw
pictures of it in the Sunday papers and in the movies, and (unless one was
a perverse individualist) enjoyed the sensation of vibrating to the same
chord which thrilled a vast populace.

The country had bread, but it wanted circuses-and now it could go to them a
hundred million strong.

[2]

Mah Jong was still popular during the winter of 1923-24-the winter when
Calvin Coolidge was becoming accustomed to the White House, and the
Bok Peace Prize was awarded, and the oil scandals broke, and Woodrow
Wilson died, and General Dawes went overseas to preside over the
reparations conference, and So Big outsold all other novels, and people
were tiring of "Yes, We Have No Bananas," and to the delight of every
rotogravure editor the lid of the stone sarcophagus of King Tutankhamen's
tomb was raised at Luxor. Mah Jong was popular, but it had lost its novelty.

It was during that winter-on January 2, 1924, to be precise-that a young
man in New York called on his aunt. The aunt had a relative who was
addicted to the cross-word puzzles which appeared every Sunday in the
magazine supplement of the New York World, and asked the young man
whether there was by any chance a book of these puzzles; it might make a
nice present for her relative. The young man, on due inquiry, found that
there was no such thing as a book of them, although cross-word puzzles
dated back at least to 1913 and had been published in the World for years.
But as it happened, he himself (his name was Richard Simon) was at that
very moment launching a book-publishing business with his friend Schuster-
and with one girl as their entire staff. Simon had a bright idea, which he
communicated to Schuster the next day: they would bring out a cross-word-
puzzle book. The two young men asked Prosper Buranelli, F. Gregory
Hartswick, and Margaret Petherbridge, the puzzle editors of the World, to
prepare it; and despite a certain coolness on the part of the book-sellers,
who told them that the public "wasn't interested in puzzle books," they
brought it out in mid-April.

Their promotion campaign was ingenious and proved to be prophetic, for
from the very beginning they advertised their book by drawing the
following parallel:

1921-Coue
1922-Mah Jong
1923-Bananas
1924 THE CROSS-WORD-PUZZLE BOOK

Within a month this odd-looking volume with a pencil attached to it had
become a best seller. By the following winter its sales had mounted into
the hundreds of thousands, other publishers were falling over themselves
to get out books which would reap an advantage from the craze, it was a
dull newspaper which did not have its daily puzzle, sales of dictionaries
were bounding, there was a new demand for that ancient and honorable
handmaid of the professional writer, Roget's Thesaurus, a man had been
sent to jail in New York for refusing to leave a restaurant after four hours
of trying to solve a puzzle, and Mrs. Mary Zaba of Chicago was reported to
be a "cross-word widow," her husband apparently being so busy with
puzzles that he had no time to support her. The newspapers carried the
news that a Pittsburgh pastor had put the text of his sermon into a puzzle.
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad placed dictionaries in all the trains on its
main line. A traveler between New York and Boston reported that 60 per
cent of the passengers were trying to fill up the squares in their puzzles,
and that in the dining-car five waiters were trying to think of a five-letter
word which meant "serving to inspire fear." Anybody you met on the street
could tell you the name of the Egyptian sun-god or provide you with the
two-letter word which meant a printer's measure.

The cross-word puzzle craze gradually died down in 1925. It was followed
by a minor epidemic of question-and-answer books; there was a time when
ladies and gentlemen with vague memories faced frequent humiliation after
dinner because they were unable to identify John Huss or tell what an ohm
was. Not until after contract bridge was introduced in the United States in
1926 did they breathe easily. Despite the decline of the cross-word puzzle,
however, it remained throughout the rest of the decade a daily feature in
most newspapers; and Simon and Schuster, bringing out their sixteenth
series in 1930, figured their total sales since early 1924 at nearly three-
quarters of a million copies, and the grand total, including British and
Canadian sales, at over two million.

[3]

This craze, like the Mah Jong craze which preceded it, was a fresh
indication of the susceptibility of the American people to fads, but it was
not in any real sense a creature of the new ballyhoo newspaper
technique. The newspapers did not pick it up until it was well on its way.
The greatest demonstrations of the power of the press to excite the
millions over trifles were yet to come.

There was, of course, plenty to interest the casual newspaper reader in
1924 and early 1925, when everybody was doing puzzles. There was the
presidential campaign, though this proved somewhat of an anticlimax after
the sizzling Democratic Convention at Madison Square Garden, that long-
drawn-out battle between the forces of William G. McAdoo and Al Smith
which ended in a half-hearted stampede to John W. Davis; so much
emotional energy had been expended by the Westerners in hating the
Tammany Catholic and by the Tammanyites in singing "The Sidewalks of
New York," that the Democratic party never really collected itself, and the
unimpassioned Calvin, with his quiet insistence upon economy and tax
reduction and his knack for making himself appear the personal
embodiment of prosperity, was carried into office by a vast majority. There
was also the trial of Leopold and Loeb for the murder of Bobby Franks in
Chicago. There was the visit of the Prince of Wales to Long Island, during
which he danced much, played polo, went motor-boating, and was detected
in the act of reading The Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page. (It was in
1924, by the way, that those other importations from Britain, the
voluminous gray flannel trousers known as Oxford bags, first hung about
the heels of the up-and-coming young male.) There was a noteworthy
alliance between a representative of the nobility of France and a
representative of the nobility of Hollywood: Gloria Swanson married the
Marquis de la Falaise de la Coudray. There was a superb eclipse of the sun,
providentially arranged for the delectation of the Eastern seaboard cities.
There was Paavo Nurmi: watch in hand, his heels thudding on the board
track, Nurmi outran the chesty taxi-driver, Joie Ray, and later performed
the incredible feat of covering two miles in less than nine minutes. There
was the hullabaloo over bringing the serum to Nome to end a diphtheria
epidemic, which for a few days made national heroes of Leonard Seppalla,
Gunnar Kasson, and the dog Balto. And there was Floyd Collins imprisoned
in his cave.

It was the tragedy of Floyd Collins, perhaps, which gave the clearest
indication up to that time of the unanimity with which the American people
could become excited over a quite unimportant event if only it were
dramatic enough.

Floyd Collins was an obscure young Kentuckian who had been exploring an
underground passage five miles from Mammoth Cave, with no
more heroic purpose than that of finding something which might attract
lucrative tourists. Some 125 feet from daylight he was caught by a cave in
which pinned his foot under a huge rock. So narrow and steep was the
passage that those who tried to dig him out had to hitch along on their
stomachs in cold slime and water and pass back from hand to hand the earth
and rocks that they pried loose with hammers and blow-torches. Only a few
people might have heard of Collins's predicament if W. B. Miller of the
Louisville Courier-Journal had not been slight of stature, daring, and an able
reporter. Miller wormed his way down the slippery, tortuous passageway to
interview Collins, became engrossed in the efforts to rescue the man,
described them in vivid dispatches-and to his amazement found that the
entire country was turning to watch the struggle. Collins's plight contained
those elements of dramatic suspense and individual conflict with fate which
make a great news story, and every city editor, day after day, planted it on
page one. When Miller arrived at Sand Cave he had found only three men at
the entrance, warming themselves at a fire and wondering, without
excitement, how soon their friend would extricate himself. A fortnight later
there was a city of a hundred or more tents there and the milling crowds had
to be restrained by barbed-wire barriers and state troops with drawn
bayonets; and on February 17, 1925, even the New York Times gave a three-
column page-one headline to the news of the denouement:

FIND FLOYD COLLINS DEAD IN CAVE TRAP ON 18TH DAY;
LIFELESS AT LEAST 24 HOURS; FOOT MUST BE AMPUTATED TO
GET BODY OUT

Within a month, as Charles Merz later reminded the readers of the New
Republic, there was a cave-in in a North Carolina mine in which 71 men
were caught and 53 actually lost. It attracted no great notice. It was "just a
mine disaster." Yet for more than two weeks the plight of a single
commonplace prospector for tourists riveted the attention of the nation on
Sand Cave, Kentucky. It was an exciting show to watch, and the dispensers
of news were learning to turn their spotlights on one show at a time.

Even the Collins thriller, however, was as nothing beside the spectacle
which was offered a few months later when John Thomas Scopes was tried
at Dayton, Tennessee, for teaching the doctrine of evolution in the Central
High School.
The Scopes case had genuine significance. It dramatized one of the most
momentous struggles of the age-the conflict between religion and science. Yet
even this trial, so diligently and noisily was it ballyhooed, took on some of the
aspects of a circus.

[4]

If religion lost ground during the Post-war Decade, the best available church
statistics gave no sign of the fact. They showed, to be sure, a
very slow growth in the number of churches in use; but this was explained partly by the tendency toward consolidation of existing churches and
partly by the trend of population toward the cities-a trend which drew
the church-going public into fewer churches with larger congregations.
The number of church members, on the other hand, grew just about as
fast as the population, and church wealth and expenditures grew more.
rapidly still. On actual attendance at services there were no reliable
figures, although it was widely believed that an increasing proportion
of the nominally faithful were finding other things to do on Sunday
morning. Statistically, the churches apparently just about maintained
their position in American life.

Yet it is difficult to escape the conclusion that they maintained it chiefly by the
force of momentum-and to some extent, perhaps, by diligent attention to the
things which are Cesar's's: by adopting, here and there, the acceptable gospel
according to Bruce Barton; by strenuous membership and money-raising
campaigns (such as Bishop Manning's high-pressure drive in New York for a
"house of prayer for all people," which proved to be a house of prayer under
strictly Episcopal auspices); and by the somewhat secular lure of church
theatricals, open forums, basket-ball and swimming pools, and muscular good
fellowship for the young. Something spiritual had gone out of the churches-a
sense of certainty that theirs was the way to salvation. Religion was furiously
discussed; there had never been so many books on religious topics in circulation,
and the leading divines wrote constantly for the popular magazines; yet all this
discussion was itself a sign that for millions of people religion had become a
debatable subject instead of being accepted without question among the traditions
of the community.

If church attendance declined, it was perhaps because, as Walter Lippmann put it,
people were not so certain that they were going to meet God when they went to
church. If the minister's prestige declined, it was in many cases because he had
lost his one-time conviction that he
had a definite and authoritative mission. The Reverend Charles Stelzle, a shrewd
observer of religious conditions, spoke bluntly in an article in the World's Work:
the church, he said, was declining largely because "those who are identified with it
do not actually believe in it." Mr. Stelzle told of asking groups of Protestant
ministers what there was in their church programs which would prompt them, if
they were outsiders, to say, "That is great; that is worth lining up for," and of
receiving in no case an immediate answer which satisfied even the answerer
himself. In the congregations, and especially among the younger men and women,
there was an undeniable weakening of loyalty to the church and an undeniable
vagueness as to what it had to offer them-witness, for example, the tone of the
discussions which accompanied the abandonment of compulsory chapel in a
number of colleges.

This loss of spiritual dynamic was variously ascribed to the general let-down in
moral energy which followed the strain of the war; to prosperity, which
encouraged the comfortable belief that it profited a man very considerably if he
gained a Cadillac car and a laudatory article in the American Magazine; to the
growing popularity of Sunday golf and automobiling; and to disapproval in some
quarters of the political lobbying of church organizations, and disgust at the
connivance of many ministers in the bigotry of the Klan. More important than any
of these causes, however, was the effect upon the churches of scientific doctrines
and scientific methods of thought.

The prestige of science was colossal. The man in the street and the woman in the
kitchen, confronted on every hand with new machines and devices which they
owed to the laboratory, were ready to believe that science could accomplish
almost anything; and they were being deluged with scientific information and
theory. The newspapers were giving columns of space to inform (or misinform)
them of the latest discoveries: a new dictum from Albert Einstein was now front-
page stuff even though practically nobody could understand it. Outlines of
knowledge poured from the presses to tell people about the planetesimal
hypothesis and the constitution of the atom, to describe for them in unwarranted
detail the daily life of the cave-man, and to acquaint them with electrons,
endocrines, hormones, vitamins, reflexes, and psychoses. On the lower
intellectual levels, millions of people were discovering for the first time that
there was such a thing as the venerable theory of evolution. Those who had
assimilated this doctrine without disaster at an early age were absorbing from
Wells, Thomson, East, Wiggam, Dorsey, and innumerable other popularizers and
interpreters of science
a collection of ideas newer and more disquieting: that we are residents of
an insignificant satellite of a very average star obscurely placed in one of
who-knows-how-many galaxies scattered through space; that our behavior
depends largely upon chromosomes and ductless glands; that the Hottentot
obeys impulses similar to those which activate the pastor of the First
Baptist Church, and is probably already better adapted to his Hottentot
environment than he would be if he followed the Baptist code; that sex is
the most important thing in life, that inhibitions are not to be tolerated, that
sin is an out-of-date term, that most untoward behavior is the result of
complexes acquired at an early age, and that men and women are mere
bundles of behavior-patterns, anyhow. If some of the scientific and
pseudoscientific principles which lodged themselves in the popular mind
contradicted one another, that did not seem to matter: the popular mind
appeared equally ready to believe with East and Wiggam in the power of
heredity and with Watson in the power of environment.

Of all the sciences it was the youngest and least scientific which most
captivated the general public and had the most disintegrating effect upon
religious faith. Psychology was king. Freud, Adler, Jung, and Watson had
their tens of thousands of votaries; intelligence-testers invaded the schools
in quest of I.Q.s; psychiatrists were installed in business houses to hire and
fire employees and determine advertising policies; and one had only to
read the newspapers to be told with complete assurance that psychology
held the key to the problems of waywardness, divorce, and crime.

The word science had become a shibboleth. To preface a statement with
"Science teaches us" was enough to silence argument. If a sales manager
wanted to put over a promotion scheme or a clergyman to recommend a
charity, they both hastened to say that it was scientific.

The effect of the prestige of science upon churchmen was well summed up
by Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick at the end of the decade:

"The men of faith might claim for their positions ancient tradition,
practical usefulness, and spiritual desirability, but one query could prick all
such bubbles: Is it scientific? That question has searched religion for
contraband goods, stripped it of old superstitions, forced it to change its
categories of thought and methods of work, and in general has so cowed
and scared religion that many modern-minded believers . . . instinctively
throw up their hands at the mere whisper of it .... When a prominent
scientist comes out strongly for religion, all the churches thank Heaven
and take courage as though it were the highest possible
compliment to God to have Eddington believe in Him. Science has become
the arbiter of this generation's thought, until to call even a prophet and a
seer scientific is to cap the climax of praise."

So powerful was the invasion of scientific ideas and of the scientific habit
of reliance upon proved acts that the Protestant churches-which numbered
in their membership five out of every eight adult church members in the
United States-were broken into two warring camps. Those who believed in
the letter of the Bible and refused to accept any teaching, even of science,
which seemed to conflict with it, began in 1921 to call themselves
Fundamentalists. The Modernists (or Liberals), on the other hand, tried to
reconcile their beliefs with scientific thought: to throw overboard what
was out of date, to retain what was essential and intellectually respectable,
and generally to mediate between Christianity and the skeptical spirit of
the age.

The position of the Fundamentalists seemed almost hopeless. The tide of
all rational thought in a rational age seemed to be running against them. But
they were numerous, and at least there was no doubt about where they
stood. Particularly in the South they controlled the big Protestant
denominations. And they fought strenuously. They forced the liberal
Doctor Fosdick out of the pulpit of a Presbyterian church and back into his
own Baptist fold, and even caused him to be tried for heresy (though there
was no churchman in America more influential than he). They introduced
into the legislatures of nearly half the states of the Union bills designed to
forbid the teaching of the doctrine of evolution; in Texas, Louisiana,
Arkansas, and South Carolina they pushed such bills through one house of
the legislature only to fail in the other; and in Tennessee, Oklahoma, and
Mississippi they actually succeeded in writing their anachronistic wishes
into law.

The Modernists had the Zeitgeist on their side, but they were not united.
Their interpretations of God-as the first cause, as absolute energy, as
idealized reality, as a righteous will working in creation, as the ideal and
goal toward which all that is highest and best is moving-were confusingly
various and ambiguous. Some of these interpretations offered little to
satisfy the worshiper: one New England clergyman said that when he
thought of God he thought of "a sort of oblong blur." And the Modernists
threw overboard so many doctrines in which the bulk of American
Protestants had grown up believing (such as the Virgin birth, the
resurrection of the body, and the Atonement) that they seemed to many to
have no religious cargo left except a nebulous faith, a general benevolence,
and a disposition to assure everyone that he was really
just as religious as they. Gone for them, as Walter Lippmann said, was "that
deep, compulsive, organic faith in an external fact which is the essence of
religion for all but that very small minority who can live within themselves
in mystical communion or by the power of their understanding." The
Modernists, furthermore, had not only Fundamentalism to battle with, but
another adversary, the skeptic nourished on outlines of science; and the
sermons of more than one Modernist leader gave the impression that
Modernism, trying to meet the skeptic's arguments without resorting to the
argument from authority, was being forced against its will to whittle down
its creed to almost nothing at all.

All through the decade the three-sided conflict reverberated. It reached its
climax in the Scopes case in the summer of 1925.

The Tennessee legislature, dominated by Fundamentalists, passed a bill
providing that "it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the universities,
normals and all other public schools of the State, which are supported in
whole or in part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory
that denies the story of the Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible,
and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals."

This law had no sooner been placed upon the books than a little group of
men in the sleepy town of Dayton, Tennessee, decided to put it to the test.
George Rappelyea, a mining engineer, was drinking lemon phosphates in
Robinson's drug store with John Thomas Scopes, a likeable young man of
twenty-four who taught biology at the Central High School, and two or
three others. Rappelyea proposed that Scopes should allow himself to be
caught red-handed in the act of teaching the theory of evolution to an
innocent child, and Scopes-half serious, half in joke-agreed. Their motives
were apparently mixed; it was characteristic of the times that (according to
so friendly a narrator of the incident as Arthur Garfield Hays) Rappelyea
declared that their action would put Dayton on the map. At all events, the
illegal deed was shortly perpetrated and Scopes was arrested. William
Jennings Bryan forthwith volunteered his services to the prosecution;
Rappelyea wired the Civil Liberties Union in New York and secured for
Scopes the legal assistance of Clarence Darrow, Dudley Field Malone, and
Arthur Garfield Hays; the trial was set for July, 1925, and Dayton suddenly
discovered that it was to be put on the map with a vengeance.

There was something to be said for the right of the people to decide what
should be taught in their tax-supported schools, even if what they decided
upon was ridiculous. But the issue of the Scopes case, as the
great mass of newspaper readers saw it, was nothing so abstruse as the
rights of taxpayers versus academic freedom. In the eyes of the public, the
trial was a battle between Fundamentalism on the one hand and twentieth-
century skepticism (assisted by Modernism) on the other. The champions
of both causes were headliners. Bryan had been three times a candidate for
the Presidency, had been Secretary of State, and was a famous orator; he
was the perfect embodiment of old-fashioned American idealism-friendly,
naive, provincial. Darrow, a radical, a friend of the underdog, an agnostic,
had recently jumped into the limelight of publicity through his defense of
Leopold and Loeb. Even Tex Rickard could hardly have staged a more
promising contest than a battle between these two men over such an
emotional issue.

It was a strange trial. Into the quiet town of Dayton flocked gaunt
Tennessee farmers and their families in mule-drawn wagons and ram-
shackle Fords; quiet, godly people in overalls and gingham and black,
ready to defend their faith against the "foreigners," yet curious to know
what this new-fangled evolutionary theory might be. Revivalists of every
sort flocked there, too, held their meetings on the outskirts of the town
under the light of flares, and tacked up signs on the trees about the
courthouse= "Read Your Bible Daily for One Week," and "Be Sure
Your Sins Will Find You Out," and at the very courthouse gate:

TIDE KINGDOM OF GOD

The sweetheart love of Jesus Christ and Paradise Street
is at hand. Do you want
to be a sweet angel? Forty days of prayer. Itemize your sins
and iniquities for
eternal life. If you come clean, God will talk back to you in voice.

Yet the atmosphere of Dayton was not simply that of rural piety. Hotdog
venders and lemonade venders set up their stalls along the streets as if it
were circus day. Booksellers hawked volumes on biology. Over a hundred
newspapermen poured into the town. The Western Union installed twenty-
two telegraph operators in a room off a grocery store. In the courtroom
itself, as the trial impended, reporters and cameramen crowded alongside
grim-faced Tennessee countrymen; there was a buzz of talk, a shuffle of
feet, a ticking of telegraph instruments, an air of suspense like that of a first-
night performance at the theater. Judge, defendant, and counsel were
stripped to their shirt sleeves-Bryan in a pongee shirt turned in at the neck,
Darrow with lavender suspenders, Judge Raulston with galluses of a more
sober judicial hue-yet fashion was not wholly absent: the news was flashed
over the wires to the whole
country that the judge's daughters, as they entered the courtroom with him,
wore rolled stockings like any metropolitan flapper's. Court was opened
with a pious prayer-and motion-picture operators climbed upon tables and
chairs to photograph the leading participants in the trial from every
possible angle. The evidence ranged all the way from the admission of
fourteen-year-old Howard Morgan that Scopes had told him about
evolution and that it hadn't hurt him any, to the estimate of a zoologist that
life had begun something like six hundred million years ago (an assertion
which caused gasps and titters of disbelief from the rustics in the
audience). And meanwhile two million words were being telegraphed out
of Dayton, the trial was being broadcast by the Chicago Tribune's station
WGN, the Dreamland Circus at Coney Island offered "Zip" to the Scopes
defense as a "missing link," cable companies were reporting enormous
increases in transatlantic cable tolls, and news agencies in London were
being besieged with requests for more copy from Switzerland, Italy,
Germany, Russia, China, and Japan. Ballyhoo had come to Dayton.

It was a bitter trial. Attorney-General Stewart of Tennessee cried out
against the insidious doctrine which was "undermining the faith of
Tennessee's children and robbing them of their chance of eternal life."
Bryan charged Darrow with having only one purpose, "to slur at the Bible."
Darrow spoke of Bryan's "fool religion." Yet again and again the scene
verged on farce. The climax-both of bitterness and of farce came on the
afternoon of July 20th, when on the spur of the moment Hays asked that
the defense be permitted to put Bryan on the stand as an expert on the
Bible, and Bryan consented.

So great was the crowd that afternoon that the judge had decided to move
the court outdoors, to a platform built against the courthouse under the
maple trees. Benches were set out before it. The reporters sat on the
benches, on the ground, anywhere, and scribbled their stories. On the
outskirts of the seated crowd a throng stood in the hot sunlight which
streamed down through the trees. And on the platform sat the shirtsleeved
Clarence Darrow, a Bible on his knee, and put the Fundamentalist champion
through one of the strangest examinations which ever took place in a court
of law.

He asked Bryan about Jonah and the whale, Joshua and the sun, where
Cain got his wife, the date of the Flood, the significance of the Tower of
Babel. Bryan affirmed his belief that the world was created in 4004 B.C. and
the Flood occurred in or about 2348 B.C.; that Eve was literally made out of
Adam's rib; that the Tower of Babel was responsible
for the diversity of languages in the world; and that a "big fish" had
swallowed Jonah. When Darrow asked him if he had ever discovered where
Cain got his wife, Bryan answered: "No, sir; I leave the agnostics to hunt
for her." When Darrow inquired, "Do you say you do not believe that there
were any civilizations on this earth that reach back beyond five thousand
years?" Bryan stoutly replied, "I am not satisfied by any evidence I have
seen." Tempers were getting frazzled by the strain and the heat; once
Darrow declared that his purpose in examining Bryan was "to show up
Fundamentalism . . . to prevent bigots and ignoramuses from controlling
the educational system of the United States," and Bryan jumped up, his face
purple, and shook his fist at Darrow, crying, "To protect the word of God
against the greatest atheist and agnostic in the United States!"

It was a savage encounter, and a tragic one for the ex-Secretary of State. He
was defending what he held most dear. He was making-though he did not
know it-his last appearance before the great American public which had
once done him honor (he died scarcely a week later). And he was being
covered with humiliation. The sort of religious faith which he represented
could not take the witness stand and face reason as a prosecutor.

On the morning of July 21st Judge Raulston mercifully refused to let the
ordeal of Bryan continue and expunged the testimony of the previous
afternoon. Scopes's lawyers had been unable to get any of their scientific
evidence before the jury, and now they saw that their only chance of
making the sort of defense they had planned for lay in giving up the case
and bringing it before the Tennessee Supreme Court on appeal. Scopes was
promptly found guilty and fined one hundred dollars. The State Supreme
Court later upheld the anti-evolution law but freed Scopes on a
technicality, thus preventing further appeal.

Theoretically, Fundamentalism had won, for the law stood. Yet really
Fundamentalism had lost. Legislators might go on passing anti-evolution
laws, and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their religion locked
in a science-proof compartment of their minds; but civilized opinion
everywhere had regarded the Dayton trial with amazement and amusement,
and the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.

The reporters, the movie men, the syndicate writers, the telegraph
operators shook the dust of Dayton from their feet. This monkey trial had
been a good show for the front pages, but maybe it was a little too
highbrow in its implications. What next? . . . How about a good clean fight
without any biology in it?

[5]

The year 1925 drew slowly toward its close. The Shenandoah--a great
navy dirigible-was wrecked, and for a few days the country supped on
horror. The Florida real-estate boom reached its dizziest height. And then
the football season revealed what the ballyhoo technique could do for a
football star. Nobody needed a course in biology to appreciate Red Grange.

The Post-war Decade was a great sporting era. More men were playing golf
than ever before-playing it in baggy plus-fours, with tassels at the knee and
checked stockings. There were five thousand golf-courses in the United
States, there were said to be two million players, and it was estimated that
half a billion dollars was spent annually on the game. The ability to play it
had become a part of the almost essential equipment of the aspiring
business executive. The country club had become the focus of social life in
hundreds of communities. But it was an even greater era for watching
sports than for taking part in them. Promoters, chambers of commerce,
newspaper-owners, sports writers, press agents, radio broadcasters, all
found profit in exploiting the public's mania for sporting shows and its
willingness to be persuaded that the great athletes of the day were
supermen. Never before had such a blinding light of publicity been turned
upon the gridiron, the diamond, and the prize ring.

Men who had never learned until the nineteen-twenties the difference
between a brassie and a niblick grabbed their five-star editions to read about
Bobby Jones's exploits with his redoubtable putter, Calamity Jane. There
was big money in being a successful golf professional: Walter Hagen's
income for several years ranged between forty and eighty thousand dollars,
and for a time he received thirty thousand a year and a house for lending the
prestige of his presence and his name to a Florida real-estate development.
World Series baseball crowds broke all records. So intense was the
excitement over football that stadia seating fifty and sixty and seventy
thousand people were filled to the last seat when the big teams met, while
scores of thousands more sat in warm living-rooms to hear the play-by-play
story over the radio and to be told by Graham McNamee that it certainly
was cold on the upper rim of the amphitheater. The Yale Athletic
Association was said to have taken in over a million dollars in ticket money
in a single season. Teams which represented
supposed institutions of learning went barnstorming for weeks at a time,
imbibing what academic instruction they might on the sleeping car between
the Yankee Stadium and Chicago or between Texas and the Tournament of
Roses at Pasadena. More Americans could identify Knute Rockne as the
Notre Dame coach than could tell who was the presiding officer of the
United States Senate. The fame of star football players, to be sure, was
ephemeral compared with that of Jones in golf, or of Ruth in baseball, or of
Tilden in tennis. Aldrich, Owen, Bo McMillin, Ernie Nevers, Grange, the
Four Horsemen, Benny Friedman, Caldwell, Cagle, and Albie Booth all
reigned briefly. But the case of Red Grange may illustrate to what heights a
hero of the stadium could rise in the consulship of Calvin Coolidge, when
pockets were full and the art of ballyhoo was young and vigorous.

"Harold E. Grange-the middle name is Edward-was born in Forksville,
Sullivan County, Pennsylvania, on June 13, 1903," announced a publicity
item sent out to the press to put the University of Illinois on the map by
glorifying its greatest product. "His father, Lyle N. Grange, in his youth had
been the king of lumberjacks in the Pennsylvania mountains, being
renowned for his strength, skill, and daring. His mother, a sweet and lovely
girl, died when `Red' was five years old, and it was this which determined
his father to move from Pennsylvania to Wheaton, Illinois .... The father,
who never married again, is deputy sheriff at Wheaton."

But the publicity item (which continues in this rhapsodic tone for many a
paragraph) is perhaps too leisurely. Suffice it to say that Red Grange-the
"Wheaton iceman," as they called him-played football exceedingly well for
the University of Illinois, so well that at the end of the season of 1925 (his
senior year) he decided not to bother any further with education at the
moment, but to reap the harvest of his fame. Let a series of items
summarizing the telegraphic press dispatches tell the story:

Nov. 2-Grange is carried two miles by students.
Nov. 3-His football jersey will be framed at Illinois.
Nov. 11-Admirers circulate petition nominating him for Congress despite
his being
under age. Is silent on $40,000 offer from New York Giants for
three games.
Nov. 17-Is offered $120,000 a year by real-estate firm.
Nov. 21-Plays last game with Illinois, turns professional. Nov. 22-Signs
with
Chicago Bears.
Nov. 26-Plays first professional game with Bears and collects $12,000.
Dec. 6-Collects $30,000 in first New York game.
Dec. 7-Signs $300,000 movie contract with Arrow Picture Corporation; may earn
$100,000 by June.
Dec. 8-Is presented to President Coolidge.

The public is fickle, however. Within a few months Gertrude Ederle and the first mother
to swim the English Channel were being welcomed in New York with thunderous
applause. Dempsey and Tunney were preparing for their Philadelphia fight, and the
spotlight had left Red Grange. Five years later he was reported to be working in a night
club in Hollywood, while that other hero of the backfield, Caldwell of Yale, was running
a lunchroom in New Haven. Sic transit.

The public mania for vicarious participation in sport reached its climax in the two
Dempsey-Tunney fights, the first at Philadelphia in September, 1926, the second at
Chicago a year later. Prize-fighting, once outlawed, had become so respectable in
American eyes that gentlefolk crowded into the ringside seats and a clergyman on Long
Island had to postpone a meeting of his vestrymen so that they might listen in on one of
the big bouts. The newspapers covered acres of paper for weeks beforehand with
gossip and prognostications from the training-camps; public interest was whipped up by
such devices as signed articles-widely syndicated-in which the contestants berated each
other (both sets of articles, in one case, being written by the same "ghost"), and even a
paper so traditionally conservative in its treatment of sports as the New York Times
announced the result of a major bout with three streamer headlines running all the way
across its front page. One hundred and thirty thousand people watched Tunney outbox
a weary Dempsey at Philadelphia and paid nearly two million dollars for the privilege;
one hundred and forty five thousand people watched the return match at Chicago and
the receipts reached the incredible sum of $2,600,000. Compare that sum with the
trifling $452,000 taken in when Dempsey gained his title from Willard in 1919 and you
have a measure of what had happened in a few years. So enormous was the
amphitheater at Chicago that two-thirds of the people in the outermost seats did not
know who had won when the fight was over. Nor was the audience limited to the
throng in Chicago, for millions more-forty million, the radio people claimed-heard the
breathless story of it, blow by blow, over the radio. During the seventh round-when
Tunney fell and the referee, by delaying the beginning of his count until Dempsey had
reached his corner, gave Tunney some thirteen seconds to recover-five Americans dropped dead of heart failure at their
radios. Five other deaths were attributed to the excitement of hearing the radio story of
the fight.

Equally remarkable was the aftermath of these two mighty contests. Dempsey had been a mauler at the beginning of the decade; he was an ex-mauler at its
end. Not so Tunney. From the pinnacle of his fame he stepped neatly off on to those
upper levels of literary and fashionable society in which heavyweight champions, haloed
by publicity, were newly welcome. Having received $1,742,282 in three years for his
prowess in the ring, Tunney lectured on Shakespeare before Professor Phelps's class at
Yale, went for a walking trip in Europe with Thornton Wilder (author of the best-selling
novel of the year, The Bridge of San Luis Rey), married a young gentlewoman of
Greenwich, Connecticut, and after an extensive stay abroad returned to the United
States with
his bride, giving out on his arrival a prepared statement which, if not quite
Shakespearian or Wilderesque in its style, at least gave evidence of effort:

It is hard to realize as our ship passes through the Narrows that fifteen months have
elapsed since the Mauretania was carrying me in the other direction. During those
fifteen months Mrs. Tunney and I have visited many countries and have met some very
interesting people. We thoroughly enjoyed our travels, but find the greatest joy of all in
again being home with our people and friends.

The echo of a rumor at home that I am contemplating returning to the boxing game to
defend the heavyweight championship reached me in Italy. This is in no sense true, for I
have permanently ended my public career. My great work now is to live quietly and
simply, for this manner of living brings me most happiness.

The sports writers were decidedly cool toward Tunney's post-boxing career. But he
was simply exercising the ancient democratic prerogative of rising higher than his
source. Ballyhoo had exalted him to the skies,
and he took advantage of it to leave the dubious atmosphere of the pugilistic world and
seek more salubrious airs.

[6]

As 1925 gave way to 1926, the searchlight of public attention had shifted from Red
Grange to the marriage of Irving Berlin and Ellin Mackay, showing that the curiosity of
millions is no respecter of personal privacy; to the gallant rescue of the men of the
steamship Antinoe in
mid-ocean by Captain Fried of the President Roosevelt; to the exclusion from
the United States of Vera, Countess Cathcart, on the uncomplimentary ground
of moral turpitude; to Byrd's daring flight over the North Pole; and, as the
summer of 1926 arrived, to the disappearance from a bathing beach of Aimee
Semple McPherson, evangelist of a Four-Square Gospel made in California-a
disappearance that was to prove the first of a series of opera-bouffe episodes
which for years attracted wide-eyed tourists in droves to Mrs. McPherson's
Angelus Temple.

The summer passed-the summer when the English Channel was full of
swimmers, the brown jacket of The Private Life of Helen of Troy ornamented
thousands of cottage tables, girls in knee-length skirts and horizontally
striped sweaters were learning to dance the Charleston, and the Philadelphia
Sesquicentennial was sinking deeper and deeper into the red despite the aid of
the Dempsey-Tunney fight. Toward the season's end there was a striking
demonstration of what astute press-agentry could do to make a national
sensation. A young man named Rudolph Alfonzo Raffaele Pierre Filibert
Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla died in New York at the age of thirty-
one. The love-making of Rudolph Valentino (as he had understandably
preferred to call himself) had quickened the pulses of innumerable motion-
picture addicts; with his sideburns and his passionate air, "the sheik" had set
the standard for masculine sex appeal. But his lying in state in an undertaker's
establishment on Broadway would hardly have attracted a crowd which
stretched through eleven blocks if his manager had not arranged the scenes of
grief with uncanny skill, and if Harry C. Klemfuss, the undertaker's press
agent, had not provided the newspapers with everything they could desire-
such as photographs, distributed in advance, of the chamber where the actor's
body would lie, and posed photographs of the funeral cortege. (One of these
latter pictures, according to Silas Bent, was on the streets in one newspaper
before the funeral procession started.) With such practical assistance, the
press gave itself to the affair so whole-heartedly that mobs rioted about the
undertaker's and scores of people were injured. Sweet are the uses of
publicity: Valentino had been heavily in debt when he died, but his
posthumous films, according to his manager's subsequent testimony, turned
the debt into a $600,000 balance to the credit of his estate. High-minded
citizens regretted that the death of Charles William Eliot, which occurred at
about the same time, occasioned no such spectacular lamentations. But the
president emeritus of Harvard had had no professional talent to put over his
funeral in a big way.

Tunney beat Dempsey, a hurricane contributed the coup-de-grace to the
Florida boom, Queen Marie of Rumania sniffed the profits of ballyhoo from
afar and made a royal visit to the United States; and then for months on end in
the winter of 1926-27 the American people waded deep in scandal and crime.

It was four long years since the Reverend Edward W. Hall and Mrs. Eleanor
R. Mills had been found murdered near the crab-apple tree by DeRussey's
Lane outside New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 1922 the grand jury had found
no indictment. But in 1926 a tabloid newspaper in search of more circulation
dug up what purported to be important new evidence and got the case
reopened. Mrs. Hall was arrested-at such an unholy hour of the night that the
reporters and photographers of this tabloid got a scoop-and she and her two
brothers, Henry and Willie Stevens, were brought to trial, thus providing
thrills for the readers not only of the tabloid in question, but of every other
newspaper in the United States.

The most sensational scene in this most sensational trial of the decade took
place when Jane Gibson, the "pig woman," who was supposed to be dying, was
brought from her hospital to the courtroom on a stretcher and placed on a bed
facing the jury. Mrs. Gibson told a weird story. She had been pestered by corn-
robbers, it seemed, and on the night of the murder, hearing the rattle of a
wagon that she thought might contain the robbers, she saddled Jenny, her
mule, and followed the wagon down DeRussey's Lane, "peeking and peeking
and peeking." She saw a car in the Lane, with two people in it whom she
identified as Mrs. Hall and Willie Stevens. She tethered Jenny to a cedar tree,
heard the sound of a quarrel and a voice saying, "Explain these letters"; she
saw Henry and Willie Stevens in the gleam of a flashlight, she heard shots,
and then she fled in terror all the way home-only to find that she had left a
moccasin behind. Despite her fear, she went all the way back to get that
moccasin, and heard what she thought was the screeching of an owl, but found
it was a woman crying-"a big white-haired woman doing something with her
hand, crying something." She said this woman was Mrs. Hall. All this
testimony the "pig woman" gave from her bed in a wailing voice, while trained
nurses stood beside her and took her pulse; then, crying out to the defendants,
"I have told the truth! So help me God! And you know I've told the truth!" she
was borne from the room.

The testimony of the "pig woman" did not gain in force from what
was brought out about her previous checkered career; it would have
made even less impression upon the jury had they known that their "dying
witness," whose appearance in the courtroom had been so ingeniously
staged, was destined to live four years more. Mrs. Hall and her brothers
came magnificently through their ordeal, slow-witted Willie Stevens in
particular delighting millions of murder-trial fans by the way in which he
stoutly resisted the efforts of Senator Simpson to bullyrag him into
confusion. The new evidence dug up by the tabloid-consisting chiefly of a
calling-card which was supposed to have Willie Steven's fingerprint on it-
did not impress the jury.

But though the prosecution's case thus collapsed, the reputation of the
Stevens family had been butchered to make a Roman holiday of the first
magnitude for newspaper readers. Five million words were written and sent
from Somerville, New Jersey, during the first eleven days of the trial. Twice
as many newspapermen were there as at Dayton. The reporters included
Mary Roberts Rinehart, the novelist, Billy Sunday, the revivalist, and James
Mills, the husband of the murdered choir singer; and the man who had
claimed the mantle of Bryan as the leader of Fundamentalism, the Reverend
John Roach Straton, wrote a daily editorial moralizing about the case. Over
wires jacked into the largest telegraph switchboard in the world traveled the
tidings of lust and crime to every corner of the United States, and the public
lapped them up and cried for more.

So insistently did they cry that when, a few short months later, an art editor
named Albert Snyder was killed with a sash-weight by his wife and her lover,
a corset salesman named Judd Gray, once more the forces of ballyhoo got
into action. In this case there was no mystery, nor was the victim highly
placed; the only excuses for putting the Snyder Gray trial on the front page
were that it involved a sex triangle and that the Snyders were ordinary
people living in an ordinary New York suburb-the sort of people with whom
the ordinary reader could easily identify himself. Yet so great was the
demand for vicarious horrors that once more the great Western Union
switchboard was brought into action, an even more imposing galaxy of
special writers interpreted the sordid drama (including David Wark Griffith,
Peggy Joyce, and Will Durant, as well as Mrs. Rinehart, Billy Sunday, and
Doctor Straton), and once more the American people tasted blood.

In the interval between the Hall-Mills case and the Snyder-Gray case, they
had had a chance to roll an even riper scandal on their tongues. Frances
Heenan Browning, known to the multitude as "Peaches," brought suit for
separation from Edward W. Browning, a New York real-estate
man who had a penchant for giving to very young girls the delights of a
Cinderella. Supposedly sober and reputable newspapers recited the
unedifying details of "Daddy" Browning's adventures; and when the New York
Graphic, a tabloid, printed a "composograph" of Browning in pajamas
shouting "Woof! Woof! Don't be a goof!" to his half-clad wife because-
according to the caption-she "refused to parade nude," even the Daily News,
which in the past had shown no distaste for scandal, expressed its fear that if
such things went on the public would be "drenched in obscenity."

A great many people felt as the Daily News did, and regarded with dismay the
depths to which the public taste seemed to have fallen. Surely a change must
come, they thought. This carnival of commercialized degradation could not
continue.

The change came--suddenly.

[7]

The owner of the Brevoort and Lafayette Hotels in New York, Raymond
Orteig, had offered-way back in 1919-a prize of $25,000 for the first non-
stop flight between New York and Paris. Only a few days
after the conclusion of the Snyder-Gray trial, three planes were waiting for
favorable weather conditions to hop off from Roosevelt Field, just outside
New York, in quest of this prize: the Columbia, which was to be piloted by
Clarence Chamberlin and Lloyd Bertaud; the America,
with Lieutenant-Commander Byrd of North Pole fame in command; and the
Spirit of St. Louis, which had abruptly arrived from the Pacific coast with a
lone young man named Charles A. Lindbergh at the controls. There was no
telling which of the three planes would get off first, but clearly the public
favorite was the young man from the West. He was
modest, he seemed to know his business, there was something particularly
daring about his idea of making the perilous journey alone, and he was as
attractive-looking a youngster as ever had faced a camera man. The
reporters-to his annoyance-called him "Lucky Lindy" and the "Flying Fool."
The spotlight of publicity was upon him. Not yet,
however, was he a god.

On the evening of May 19, 1927, Lindbergh decided that although it was
drizzling on Long Island, the weather reports gave a chance of fair skies for
his trip and he had better get ready. He spent the small hours
of the next morning in sleepless preparations, went to Curtiss Field,
received further weather news, had his plane trundled to Roosevelt Field
and fueled, and a little before eight o'clock-on the morning of May 20th-
climbed in and took off for Paris.

Then something very like a miracle took place.

No sooner had the word been flashed along the wires that Lindbergh had
started than the whole population of the country became united in the
exaltation of a common emotion. Young and old, rich and poor, farmer and
stockbroker, Fundamentalist and skeptic, highbrow and lowbrow, all with
one accord fastened their hopes upon the young man in the Spirit of St. Louis.
To give a single instance of the intensity of their mood: at the Yankee
Stadium in New York, where the Maloney-Sharkey fight was held on the
evening of the 20th, forty thousand hard-boiled boxing fans rose as one man
and stood with bared heads in impressive silence when the announcer asked
them to pray for Lindbergh. The next day came the successive reports of
Lindbergh's success-he had reached the Irish coast, he was crossing over
England, he was over the Channel, he had landed at Le Bourget to be
enthusiastically mobbed by a vast crowd of Frenchmen-and the American
people went almost mad with joy and relief. And when the reports of
Lindbergh's first few days in Paris showed that he was behaving with
charming modesty and courtesy, millions of his countrymen took him to
their hearts as they had taken no other human being in living memory.

Every record for mass excitement and mass enthusiasm in the age of
ballyhoo was smashed during the next few weeks. Nothing seemed to
matter, either to the newspapers or to the people who read them, but
Lindbergh and his story. On the day the flight was completed the Washington
Star sold 16,000 extra copies, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch 40,000, the New
York Evening World 114,000. The huge headlines which described
Lindbergh's triumphal progress from day to day in newspapers from Maine
to Oregon showed how thorough was public agreement with the somewhat
extravagant dictum of the Evening World that Lindbergh had performed "the
greatest feat of a solitary man in the records of the human race." Upon his
return to the United States, a single Sunday issue of a single paper
contained one hundred columns of text and pictures devoted to him.
Nobody appeared to question the fitness of President Coolidge's action in
sending a cruiser of the United States navy to bring this young private
citizen and his plane back from France. He was greeted in Washington at a
vast open-air gathering at which the President made-according to Charles
Merz--"the longest and most impressive address since his annual message
to Congress." The Western Union having provided form messages for
telegrams of congratulations
to Lindbergh on his arrival, 55,000 of them were sent to him-and were
loaded on a truck and trundled after him in the parade through Washington.
One telegram, from Minneapolis, was signed with 17,500 names and made
up a scroll 520 feet long, under which ten messenger boys staggered. After
the public welcome in New York, the Street Cleaning Department gathered
up 1,800 tons of paper which had been torn up and thrown out of windows
of office buildings to make a snowstorm of greeting-1,800 tons as against a
mere 155 tons swept up after the premature Armistice celebration of
November 7, 1918!

Lindbergh was commissioned Colonel, and received the Distinguished
Flying Cross, the Congressional Medal of Honor, and so many foreign
decorations and honorary memberships that to repeat the list would be a
weary task. He was offered two and a half million dollars for a tour of the
world by air, and $700,000 to appear in the films; his signature was sold for
$1,600; a Texas town was named for him, a thirteen hundred-foot Lindbergh
tower was proposed for the city of Chicago, "the largest dinner ever
tendered to an individual in modern history" was consumed in his honor, and
a staggering number of streets, schools, restaurants, and corporations
sought to share the glory of his name.

Nor was there any noticeable group of dissenters from all this hullabaloo.
Whatever else people might disagree about, they joined in praise of him.

To appreciate how extraordinary was this universal outpouring of
admiration and love-for the word love is hardly too strong-one must remind
oneself of two or three facts.

Lindbergh's flight was not the first crossing of the Atlantic by air. Alcock
and Brown had flown direct from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1919. That
same year the N-C 4, with five men aboard, had crossed by way of the
Azores, and the British dirigible R-34 had flown from Scotland to Long
Island with 31 men aboard, and then had turned about and made a return
flight to England. The German dirigible ZR-3 (later known as the Los
Angeles) had flown from Friedrichshafen to Lakehurst, New Jersey, in 1924
with 32 people aboard. Two Round-the-World American army planes had
crossed the North Atlantic by way of Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland
in 1924. The novelty of Lindbergh's flight lay only in the fact that he went
all the way from New York to Paris instead of jumping off from
Newfoundland, that he reached his precise objective, and that he went alone.

Furthermore, there was little practical advantage in such an exploit. It
brought about a boom in aviation, to be sure, but a not altogether
healthy one, and it led many a flyer to hop off blindly for foreign shores in
emulation of Lindbergh and be drowned. Looking back on the event after a
lapse of years, and stripping it of its emotional connotations, one sees it
simply as a daring stunt flight-the longest up to that time-by a man who did
not claim to be anything but a stunt flyer. Why, then, this idolization of
Lindbergh?

The explanation is simple. A disillusioned nation fed on cheap heroics and
scandal and crime was revolting against the low estimate of human nature
which it had allowed itself to entertain. For years the American people had
been spiritually starved. They had seen their early ideals and illusions and
hopes one by one worn away by the corrosive influence of events and ideas-
by the disappointing aftermath of the war, by scientific doctrines and
psychological theories which undermined their religion and ridiculed their
sentimental notions, by the spectacle of graft in politics and crime on the
city streets, and finally by their recent newspaper diet of smut and murder.
Romance, chivalry and self-dedication had been debunked; the heroes of
history had been shown to have feet of clay, and the saints of history had
been revealed as people with queer complexes. There was the god of
business to worship-but a suspicion lingered that he was made of brass.
Ballyhoo had given the public contemporary heroes to bow down before-
but these contemporary heroes, with their fat profits from moving-picture
contracts and ghost-written syndicated articles, were not wholly
convincing. Something that people needed, if they were to live at peace
with themselves and with the world, was missing from their lives. And all at
once Lindbergh provided it. Romance, chivalry, self-dedication-here they
were, embodied in a modern Galahad for a generation which had foresworn
Galahads. Lindbergh did not accept the moving-picture offers that came his
way, he did not sell testimonials, did not boast, did not get himself involved
in scandal, conducted himself with unerring taste and was handsome and
brave withal. The machinery of ballyhoo was ready and waiting to lift him
up where every eye could see him. Is it any wonder that the public's
reception of him took on the aspects of a vast religious revival?

Lindbergh did not go back on his admirers. He undertook a series of
exhibition flights and good-will flights-successfully and with quiet dignity.
He married a daughter of the ambassador to Mexico, and in so doing
delighted the country by turning the tables on ballyhoo itself-by slipping
away with his bride on a motor-boat and remaining hidden for days despite
the efforts of hundreds of newspapermen to spy upon his
honeymoon. Wherever he went, crowds fought for a chance to be near him,
medals were pinned upon him, tributes were showered upon him, his
coming and going was news. He packed away a good-sized fortune earned
chiefly as consultant for aviation companies, but few people grudged him
that. Incredibly, he kept his head and his instinct for fine conduct.

And he remained a national idol.

Even three and four years after his flight, the roads about his New Jersey
farm were blocked on week-ends with the cars of admirers who wanted to
catch a glimpse of him, and it was said that he could not even send his shirts
to a laundry because they did not come back-they were too valuable as
souvenirs. His picture hung in hundreds of schoolrooms and in thousands
of houses. No living American-no dead American, one might almost say,
save perhaps Abraham Lincoln-commanded such unswerving fealty. You
might criticize Coolidge or Hoover or Ford or Edison or Bobby Jones or
any other headline hero; but if you decried anything that Lindbergh did, you
knew that you had wounded your auditors. For Lindbergh was a god.

Pretty good, one reflects, for a stunt flyer. But also, one must add, pretty
good for the American people. They had shown that they had better taste in
heroes than anyone would have dared to predict during the years which
immediately preceded the 20th of May, 1927.

[8]

After Lindbergh's flight the profits of heroism were so apparent that a
horde of seekers after cash and glory appeared, not all of whom seemed to
realize that one of the things which had endeared Lindbergh to his admirers
had been his indifference both to easy money and to applause. The formula
was simple. You got an airplane, some financial backing, and a press agent,
and made the first non-stop flight from one place to another place (there
were still plenty of places that nobody had flown between). You arranged in
advance to sell your personal story to a syndicate if you were successful. If
necessary you could get a good deal of your equipment without paying for
it, on condition that the purveyors of your oil or your flying suit or your
five-foot shelf might say how useful you had found it. Having landed at
your destination-and on the front pages-you promptly sold your book, your
testimonials, your appearance in vaudeville, your appearance in the movies,
or whatever else there was demand for. If you did not know how to pilot a
plane
you could still be a passenger; a woman passenger, in fact, had better
news value than a male pilot. And if flying seemed a little hazardous
for your personal taste, you could get useful publicity by giving a prize
for other people to fly after.

When Chamberlin followed Lindbergh across the Atlantic, Charles
A. Levine, the owner of the plane, was an extremely interested passenger.
He got an official welcome at New York. Everybody was getting official
welcomes at New York. Grover Whalen, the well-dressed Police Com-
missioner, was taking incessant advantage of what Alva Johnston called
the great discovery that anybody riding up Broadway at noon with a
motorcycle escort would find thousands of people gathered there in
honor of luncheon. British open golf champions, Channel swimmers,
and the Italian soccer team were greeted by Mr. Whalen as deferentially
as the Persian Minister of Finance and the Mayor of Leipzig, and it was
always fun for the citizenry to have an excuse to throw ticker tape and
fragments of the Bronx telephone directory out the window.

Byrd and his men hopped off from Roosevelt Field a few weeks after
Chamberlin and Levine, and came down in the sea-but so close to the
French coast that they waded ashore. Brock and Schlee not only crossed
the Atlantic, but continued on in a series of flights till they reached
Japan. And then a good-looking dentist's assistant from Lakeland, Florida, named Ruth Elder, who had been taking flying lessons from George
Haldeman, got a citrus-grower and a real-estate man to back her, and
Haldeman to pilot her, and set out to become the first woman transatlantic
airplane rider. She dropped into the sea much too far out to wade ashore,
as it happened; but what matter? She and Haldeman were picked up
providentially by a tanker; her manager did good business for her; and
she got her welcome-though the City of New York spent only $333.90
on greeting her, as compared with more than $1,000 for Levine, $12,000
for the President of the Irish Free State, $26,000 for Byrd, and $71,000
for Lindbergh.

After Ruth Elder there were so many flights, successful or disastrous,
that one could hardly keep track of them. They were always front-page
news, but they were less exciting than the unveiling of the new Ford
(in December, 1927) and the sinking of the steamship Vestris, which
(late in 1928) was so hysterically reported that one might have imagined
it to be the greatest marine disaster in history. There were no more
Lindberghs.

The procession of sporting heroes continued. Bobby Jones went on
from triumph to triumph, until no one could doubt that he was the
greatest golfer of all time. Babe Ruth remained the home-run king.
Cagle and Booth gave the football writers a chance to be the romantic
fellows they longed to be. Tilden was slipping, but could still beat almost
anybody but a Frenchman. Prize-fighting, however, languished, and there
were signs that the public taste in sporting exhibitions was becoming a
little jaded. The efforts to find something novel enough to arouse the
masters of ballyhoo became almost pathological: Marathon dancers
clung to one another by the hour and day and week, shuffling about the
floor in an agony of weariness, and the unhappy participants in C. C.
Pyle's "Bunion Derby" ran across the continent with results painful both
to their feet and to Mr. Pyle's fortunes as a promoter. Thousands stood
and gaped while Alvin Shipwreck Kelly sat on a flagpole. There was
still money in breaking records, even if your achievement was that of
perching on a flagpole in Baltimore for 23 days and 7 hours, having
your food and drink hoisted to you in a bucket, and hiring a man to
shout at you if you showed signs of dozing for more than twenty minutes
at a time. But nobody seemed to be persuaded that there was anything
epic about Mr. Kelly. Flagpole sitting and Marathon dancing were just
freak shows to watch in an idle moment.

Perhaps the bloom of youth was departing from ballyhoo: the technique was becoming a little too obvious. Perhaps Lindbergh had spoiled
the public for lesser heroes. Perhaps the grim execution of Sacco and
Vanzetti in 1927 and the presidential campaign of 1928 reminded a well-
fed people that there were such things as public issues, after all. But
perhaps, too, there was some significance in the fact that in March,
1928, only a few months after the new Ford appeared and less than a
year after Lindbergh's flight, the Big Bull Market went into its sensational phase. A ten-point gain in Radio common in a single day promised
more immediate benefits than all the non-stop flyers and heavyweight
champions in the world.